Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Important reminders
by
Kamasylvia
on 21/04/2024, 11:33:10 UTC
I may be hated for saying this, but what's currently happening in the mempool is a feature, not a bug. The fact that we have a fixed-sized block limit means that the current clogged up state would inevitably happen sometime.

Another important reminder: Censorship won't prevent monkey jpegs. Let's leave asides if censoring monkeys would undermine one of the important properties: It just technically doesn't work. People who spend dozens of millions of dollars in monkeys everyday can bypass every censorship measure and save them straight to the UTXO set, which would be a lot worse for the rest of us.

Here's another: As long as the law of supply and demand defines the price of block bytes, we can never on-board billions or even millions of people on a layer-1 solution, unless we undermine another important property; being practical to verify the ledger.

Final reminder: The free market decides the ideal tradeoff. "Is it better to have a dynamical block size?", "Would it be worse if we traded 'being practical to verify' with 'being for the poor'?", "Would a tail emission save the situation?". These questions are not easy to answer. However, we have a lot of cryptocurrency options, each tailored to meet different needs. It's up to us to determine which option suits us best and to refrain from complaining about the shortcomings of a single solution.

I understand that you hold the view that the current clogged state of the mempool in blockchain networks is a feature rather than a bug. The fixed block size limit certainly contributes to the occurrence of congestion.  On the other hand, there are concerns that larger blocks could lead to centralization and decrease the number of people who can participate in the network as full nodes.

You raise a valid concern regarding the scalability limitations of layer-1 solutions, especially when considering the onboarding of billions or millions of users. As the number of participants and transactions increases, the demand for block space also grows, potentially leading to congestion and higher fees.